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Quote Originally Posted by rabit View Post
Creative cards have always worked great for me on Linux, and loved the supplied tools for assembling and uploading code to run on the card's DSP.
Are you thinking about SoundFont or EAX?
Just wondering what you are talking about here.

He talks about Creative EMU10K1/EMU10k2 chipsets on real SB Live!/Audigy1/2/4 (not fakes like live! 24bit or audigy 24 bit). For these cards on Linux you have fully open driver written by community with:
*hardware accelerated OpenAL
*hardware wavetable with sound fonts sf2
*hardware mixing up 32 sounds in alsa so you can run several audio apps at once
*hardware dsp effects - you can upload dolby prologic compatibile decoder and use your card as dolby prologic decoder. And other effects.
These cards are the best for Linux when you look for hardware acceleration and features. They have weak codec, some little noise and are PCI only cards. So no PCI-E.

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Most of that stuff is obsoleted. Stuff like hardware acceleration for OpenAL 3D imaging was the hot ticket back in day when everybody was running Quake2 on 300mhz processors. Soundfonts support was the bomb back when people were trying to figure out how to use their hot new 'Multimedia' Pentium processors with their fancy 3x CDROMs and Midi plugins on their web browsers.

But nodaways...
If you have to mix software mixers have better quality and more features.
Creative destroyed 3D audio through buying up superior technologies to destroy them and then leveraging their IP portfolio to make sure that nobody else could use it without paying them money and nobody else could implement support for it.
Software synths are a lot more interesting and more flexible then sound card synths.

The whole situation is irritating, but Creative is as much to blame as anybody.

Comment

Most of that stuff is obsoleted. Stuff like hardware acceleration for OpenAL 3D imaging was the hot ticket back in day when everybody was running Quake2 on 300mhz processors. Soundfonts support was the bomb back when people were trying to figure out how to use their hot new 'Multimedia' Pentium processors with their fancy 3x CDROMs and Midi plugins on their web browsers.

But nodaways...
If you have to mix software mixers have better quality and more features.
Creative destroyed 3D audio through buying up superior technologies to destroy them and then leveraging their IP portfolio to make sure that nobody else could use it without paying them money and nobody else could implement support for it.
Software synths are a lot more interesting and more flexible then sound card synths.

The whole situation is irritating, but Creative is as much to blame as anybody.

What you describe is absolutely nothing compared to the thorough slaughtering of both E-Mu and Ensoniq done by Creative Labs. Ensoniq did great synthesizers, E-Mu had the Emulators, but all those were killed by "Creative".

Nobody will miss "Creative Labs", but I'm surely going to miss the VFX-1, the Mirage, the Emulators or the Fizmo.

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Hi all,
Sorry for bringing this ancient thread back up but are/were there any articles between now and last year about external sound cards which came on phoronix ? It isn't easy to find the articles on sound and esp. discrete sound cards.